The present day telephone system provides means for its subscribers to verbally communicate with one another. The verbal communications must occur in real time and require that the sender and recipient have simultaneous access to their telephone stations for communication. If the sender is unable to initially place the call at a time when the recipient has access to his telephone, the sender must continue to repeat the call until the recipient is present. Similarly, if the sender desires to send the same verbal message to a number of recipients, he must repeat this process of establishing telephone contact with each recipient and repeating the message. Thus, the present day method of delivering verbal communications is time consuming, and in the business community the time spent in such present day verbal communications is inefficient and reduces personal productivity.
While auxiliary devices, such as telephone recording systems, may be installed for individual telephone sets, such devices do not fill the need for the rapid and efficient delivery of verbal messages in the business community. A need has thus arisen for a centralized telecommunications system which eliminates many of the inconveniences, inefficiency and time consuming requirements of the existing telephone network.
One solution to this problem has been the very recently developed voice message system that receives audio messages from telephone stations for storage and later retrieval by another party. Normally, a user accessing these types of systems is required merely to access the system through a preset sequence of instructions that is supplied to the user in an operating manual. For a user to benefit fully from the system's features, it is necessary for a user to be quite familiar with the various features and the procedures for utilizing those features. This presents some disadvantages to users that do not utilize the system enough to become familiar with the various functions. In fact, some users use the system so little that they are not even familiar with the procedures required for the most basic features. To use the system, they must resort to the operating manual for each application. In view of the increasing number of features afforded a user and the conservative use by some user's, it is desirable to tailor the system to facilitate use by these types of users.